


For Tomorrow We Die

by bethfrish



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-14
Updated: 2005-06-14
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:16:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethfrish/pseuds/bethfrish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here's to boys who went to our beds. Pretty, witty, and otherwise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Tomorrow We Die

On the morning of Lamarque's funeral, Bossuet wakes up cold, cramped, and mostly naked. His hip aches from spending six hours curled on his side, and the sheet he went to sleep under disappeared somewhere during the course of the night, tugged away, no doubt, by the body next to his. At eight o'clock in the morning the air still rings with the chill of the night before, and the streets outside are calm and quiet.

He turns onto his back, and like a chain reaction his movements spread, first to Musichetta, and then to Joly. Musichetta fell asleep with her face in Joly's neck, and when Bossuet's movements nudge her awake, she yawns girlishly and plants a kiss on Joly's forehead. It takes her a full minute to roll over. "Good morning, Bossuet," she says tiredly. 

"Good enough for you," he tells her, waiting for a kiss that doesn't come. 

Musichetta climbs off the foot of the bed, taking the sheet with her. "I need to wash up," she tells them, wrapping the linens around her body. Joly sits up slowly and motions towards the water pitcher. Then he sneezes. "Oh, I feel worse than I did yesterday. Last night will be the death of me." 

Bossuet, still lying down, looks over at him. "Everyone's entitled to regret." 

Joly looks back at him and then turns away, bringing his knees up to his chest. "That wasn't—You talk nonsense in the morning, Bossuet," he says, but Bossuet only coughs. 

For a few minutes there's nothing but the sound of Musichetta's footsteps, pacing about in the other room. Joly fidgets and avoids looking anywhere but straight ahead, and when he finally gets up, he takes his clothes over to the corner to change. 

Musichetta's voice rings out from the door. "I'm going home. I'm tired." 

"Goodbye, then," Bossuet calls back. "Brag to all your friends." 

Joly looks horrified. 

"Oh, don't look like that," Bossuet says, trying to massage the stiffness out of his joints. "A true lady doesn't kiss and tell." 

Joly purses his lips, already up to buttoning his waistcoat. "My head feels like a brick," he says. 

"Well, there's no better remedy for that than a little food." Bossuet tries a smile, rolling off the edge of the bed. "Breakfast?" 

Joly glances over at him again and immediately averts his eyes. "All right," he says, fiddling with his cravat. 

Bossuet nods, a little solemnly, and goes to change in the other room. 

  
  
  
  


They breakfast on wine and a whole assortment of other things that Bossuet doesn't have the money to pay for. He knows that Joly will take care of it, as Joly is the provider of most things Bossuet counts on for survival. They eat quietly, staring passively out into the rain that began to attack the empty streets the moment they walked out the door. "Not at all surprising," Bossuet had commented without much disdain. Joly looked up at the sky and frowned. 

"I think I've begun to come down with your cold," Bossuet says, with only a mild amount of concern. He stacks a cube of cheese between two pieces of ham. 

Joly regards him suspiciously. "Have you? I don't see how." 

"I share your quarters, I share your germs. It's not so difficult to comprehend." Catching the glint behind Joly's eyes, he lets the ham and cheese fall, rejected, between his fingers and onto his plate. "You worry about stupid things," he says with a hint of bitterness, rolling the cheese back and forth in a trail of oyster sauce. 

Joly sneers as if he doesn't know what he's talking about. 

Grantaire comes in not long after they sit down, jovial as ever. It's hard to tell when Grantaire is truly drunk, because he acts like he is even when he's sober. Bossuet doesn't trouble himself with trying to figure out Grantaire. He's Enjolras' baggage, not his. 

Grantaire joins their table and quickly starts in on a fresh bottle of wine. "It's too early to pass out," Joly chides, but Grantaire only laughs and begins to spew string after breathless string of philosophical nonsense. 

Bossuet listens with half an ear, pouring himself more wine and thinking that this morning is just one giant hazy cloud of unease, and therefore it's as good a time as any to pass out on the table. He watches Joly pick at an oyster, prodding it with his silverware as if it might still be alive. 

Somewhere in their stunted conversation, Joly brings up Marius. Marius with his intense gaze and his flawless skin and his confused smile. Marius who comes and goes as Paris breathes, and just as easily. Bossuet thinks he would have been quite taken with the man had he not been so unbelievably innocent, projecting a sort of asexuality that surpassed human nature itself. No, not asexuality, not anymore, as Joly is in the process of making clear. But definitely not a man interested in other men. Grantaire butts in starts comparing Marius to various occurrences of the weather. 

Bossuet wonders if Marius has ever been kissed, and if he kisses the way Joly does, slow and sweet and deep, but without the part where he pulls away and distracts himself with Musichetta's breasts. 

While Grantaire rambles on about nothing in particular, a dull and constant buzz in the background of their breakfast, Bossuet touches Joly's wrist. "Don't be upset, Joly," he says quietly. "We can forget it happened, if you'd prefer." 

Joly looks stricken, and Bossuet wishes he could pick out one of the twenty possible reasons why. "I don't know what you're talking about," Joly says finally, ragged and unsure of himself, like the way Bossuet thinks Marius must kiss. 

He brings his hand back to his side of the table. "Fine then," he sighs, because he doesn't know what else to say. 

Between them, Grantaire spills more wine on the table than in his glass and throws his arms across both their shoulders. "Eat, drink, and be merry," he says gravely. "And I forget the rest." 

"You're drunk, Grantaire," Bossuet tells him. But by the time Courfeyrac comes around with hurricanes in his eyes and an army of thirty-seven, he's not feeling too stable himself. 

  
  
  
  


The main barricade is really just a tower of Paris' waste. Mattresses and furniture, broken wheels and empty barrels, all piled precariously on top of each other so that Bossuet is half-waiting for the moment when he trips and sends it crumbling. To Enjolras, it's a thing of beauty, a physical display of resistance that's supposed to smother all the fears that are bubbling in the back of everyone's minds. Bossuet thinks it looks mostly like garbage, and when he sees the chair he sat on at breakfast, it makes him laugh shakily. 

He lost track of Joly some forty-five minutes ago, but he's working on arms distribution right now and can't be bothered to find him. He doesn't need to finish the inventory to realize that there aren't going to be enough bullets. Just like he doesn't need Joly to come out and say that he wishes they'd never slept together to know that it's what he's thinking. 

He can see it plainly in the way Joly's been looking at him all morning, around him rather than at him. In the way Joly flinches whenever Bossuet touches him, inadvertently or otherwise. He felt the split-second flash of revulsion in the curl of his lips when Joly realized whose hand was in the mix of skin that had made him peak against Musichetta's thigh, whose mouth he was kissing hungrily, even as the hint of stubble scraped against his jaw. After Joly pulled away, he made no pretense of keeping his hands on Musichetta alone. It didn't take long for Bossuet to do the same. 

The buzz of this morning's wine wore off hours ago, clinging to the walls of the wineshop, leaving Bossuet with a phantom headache that he's not sure is even real. He briefly wonders if Grantaire is still asleep where they left him. 

He thinks that Grantaire can almost sympathize with him, being in love with a man who completely resents his existence. The difference is that Grantaire's feelings for Enjolras aren't sexual. The difference is that Enjolras doesn't love Grantaire. 

Joly loves Bossuet, just not the way Bossuet wants him to. Between himself and Grantaire, he can't decide which one of them is better off. 

Coincidences run rampant in a barricade of under fifty, and not far away from where he's sitting, Prouvaire and Joly step out of Corinth, armed with kegs of gunpowder. Prouvaire nods at him authoritatively as he goes by. Joly gives an awkward smile over the top of the barrel as if he's carrying a corpse. 

Bossuet raises a hand at them, hunched over on his crate-turned-chair, and realizes that he's completely lost count of the number of muskets currently in their possession. He starts over, slowly, and thinks what his life might be like if the rest of it were spent counting artillery. 

  
  
  
  


There's little to do in the shadows of the barricades, where you're lucky if you can see what's directly in front of you. A lantern flickers here and there, but the flame is weak and the light fades away between the twists of the streets and the groups of huddled bodies, and all you're left with is the waning capacity of your own straining vision. 

Bossuet leans against a broken bedframe, holding his musket in his lap. His eyes have adjusted enough that he can seen what's right in front of him, but the minute he turns his head the view becomes a void, an endless shadow of weapons and blockades and people that promises nothing explicit about the future. 

This morning he woke up dazed and sore, with his subconscious in a state of unease about more than just the night before. Because somewhere between this morning's wine and the blood rushing in his head and the piercing echo of Enjolras' voice in the wind, Bossuet's in a place where he can no longer feel the difference between hot and cold, where the strange, burning feeling in his chest keeps alternating between searing pain and frightening numbness, where there are smatters of blood on the ground that are too black to see, but even in the dark, people have already begun to die. 

Bossuet stares at the barricade in front of him until his vision blurs and everything just fades away, and sits there listening to himself breathe. When a hand lands on his shoulder—seconds, minutes, or maybe even hours later—he gives a start and fumbles with his musket until he recognizes Joly's voice, soft and empty in the hours of the night that he can't even give name to. 

"Bossuet." 

"Joly," Bossuet sighs. "You nearly gave me a heart attack. Come to sit with me?" 

Joly doesn't answer, but settles next to Bossuet against the bedframe. In the silence, Bossuet can hear the flutter of activity as it skips down the barricade. Soft murmurs of speech, the scrape of wood against pavement, the long reign of nothingness between each and every movement. 

Joly sits with his shoulder barely touching his, and Bossuet doesn't know how to take that. He doesn't know if he should apologize, or get angry, or just grab Joly and kiss him, square on the mouth, to see if maybe he likes it better the second time. Bossuet's been accident-prone his whole life. He doesn't know how to fix this either. 

On this night in a different world, he's drinking wine with his friends in the dark corner of some café, laughing and cracking jokes and playing dominoes, and when he goes home it'll be alongside some pretty young thing with mile-long lashes and curves like the Alps. Or better yet, it'll be with Joly, and they'll break open another bottle and spend the night bathed in laughter, staying up so late that they fall asleep with their heads on the table. And when they wake up, Joly will complain of a terrible crick in his neck and scold Bossuet for not forcing him to go to bed earlier, which, of course, he'll completely forget by noon, and they'll go out together, laughing, to start the day anew. 

Instead he's crouched in the darkness behind some barricade that can't even keep the cats out, and instead of laughing, his mind is on fire with too many ideas and absolutely no sense of how to apply them. He doesn't know if it's today or tomorrow, or when his life will come to an abrupt and potentially terrifying end. This morning seems like a month ago, and for a moment that lasts entirely too long, he has no idea what any of them are doing here. 

"Joly," he says into the darkness. "I don't want you to—" 

But Joly stops him by pressing a kiss against Bossuet's lips, parting his teeth as he reaches over and starts fumbling with the buttons on Bossuet's trousers. 

"Joly..." Bossuet groans when Joly slips his hand inside his pants. 

This isn't what he wants. This isn't what either of them wants, but Joly mouths "I love you" against his neck, and when Bossuet kisses him back, the bitter tang of salt stings his lips.


End file.
